TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on Manicures vs. ‘Hobo Hands’)

[SUV pulling up]

Lorelai Gilmore [played by Lauren Graham]: [Sighs] “Okay, mom, what's next?”

Emily [played by Kelly Bishop]: “You don't have to say it like that.”

Lorelai: “I just spent the last hour and a half watching you get a manicure.”

Emily: “It's my standing appointment, Lorelai.”

Lorelai: “Yes, except I was the one standing 'cause there weren't enough seats.”

Emily: “Well, if I'd missed that appointment, it would be a week before I could get another and I'd be walking around with hobo hands.”— Gilmore Girls, Season 6, Episode 21, “Driving Miss Gilmore,” original airdate May 2, 2006, teleplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, directed by Jamie Babbit

This Day in TV History (“One Day at a Time” Debuts)

December 16, 1975--Critics and fans were quick to note that the sitcom One Day at a Time, which premiered on this date on CBS, was produced by Norman Lear, already known for such boundary-pushing series as All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Maude and Sanford and Son. But few viewers of the series starring Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli took notice of the opening credits, which revealed that the series had been created by writer Allan Manings and actress Whitney Blake.

It’s hardly surprising that Manings’ contribution was overlooked. As Joe Gillis, William Holden’s cynical screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard, notes, “Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.” But the lack of notice for Blake was another matter entirely. Amazingly enough, in a reunion 30 of the show’s stars on The Today Show 30 years later, Phillips, Bertinelli and co-star Pat Harrington still had no idea about the nature of her contribution.

Only a decade before the show's debut, Blake had concluded a five-year run in a sitcom herself: Hazel, starring the Oscar-winning character actress Shirley Booth as a maid. Maybe because she played second banana to Booth, Blake did not make the same kind of impression that other actresses of the time, such as Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed or Jane Wyatt, did as TV moms.

If viewers were to recall Blake at all by 1975, it might have been because her blond good looks had been inherited by daughter Meredith Baxter, then not far into a long TV career of her own. By this time in her late 40s--an age that, at that point (and even, to a somewhat lesser extent, now) was regarded as a danger zone for leading ladies--Blake was running the danger of disappearing into the rabbit hole of TV memory.

But if Blake had barely registered as a TV mom herself, she made sure that she’d create a truly memorable one secondhand. It was Blake’s memories of raising Baxter and her siblings as a single mom that Manings, her third husband, channeled into the creation of Franklin’s character, Ann Romano.

Ann Romano might, in a way, be regarded as the missing link between The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Gilmore Girls. Allow me to explain.

Think of the situation common to MTM and ODAAT: A young woman, fresh from a busted-up relationship, relocates to a Midwestern city, where she hopes to start over and wash that man right out of her hair.

Actually, if Ms. Moore and her husband of the time, producer Grant Tinker, had had their way, there would have been an even larger similarity: Mary Richards would have been a divorcee, too.

But the Tiffany Network would have none of it. Not only were such characters practically invisible at the time (these didn’t get past the programming censors), but the network had a more prosaic concern: they were so afraid that Ms. Moore would be so associated with her previous great role as Laura Petrie that audiences would think she had run out on Dick Van Dyke!

Five years later, due in no small part to Lear, all the old taboos were gone--and Bonnie Franklin, better known for roles on the stage (notably Applause, the musical version of All About Eve), was far more of a blank slate than Moore. The top brass at CBS, then, were far more ready for an idea about a divorced mom struggling to make ends meet in Indianapolis with her teenage daughters. Blake and Manings brought the idea to Lear, who developed it further.

One Day at a Time went on to run for nine years and 209 episodes. Some of its DNA ended up encoded in the likes of Kate and Allie, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and The Gilmore Girls. (The latter show also featured an actress, Lauren Graham, who, like Franklin, was only in her early 30s when the show premiered--not much older than the actress(es) who played her daughter(s).)

The Gilmore Girls had one less daughter than One Day at a Time, but somehow the estrogen level seemed more amped up. True, Lorelai Gilmore had her diner love interest, Luke, but there’s a Sensitive New Age Guy lurking beneath his blue baseball hat (tipped off by the fact that he cooks but Lorelai doesn’t, which allows him to criticize her unhealthy eating habits).

“Sensitive” is not the word that comes to mind about Dwayne Schneider, the building superintendent played to perfection by Pat Harrington. With his moustache constantly twitching expectantly in the hope that Ann Romano would respond to his flirtatious hints, his cigarette dangling from his lip and his tool-belt hanging from his waist like a gun holster, the character became “the Burt Reynolds of the Boiler Room.”

TV Quote of the Day (“The Gilmore Girls,” on an Appropriate Xmas Gift for the Hot Intellectual Boyfriend)

Lane Kim (played by Keiko Agena): “You got Dean a book?”

Rory Gilmore (played by Alexis Bledel): “Yeah, Metamorphosis.”

Lane: “Metamorphosis!?”

Rory: “It's Kafka.”

Lane: “Very romantic.”

Rory: “I think it is very romantic.”

Lane: “I know I’ve always dreamed some guy would get me a really confusing Czechoslovakian novel.”—The Gilmore Girls, “Forgiveness and Stuff,” written by John Stephens, directed by Bethany Rooney, original airdate December 21, 2009

Nine years since this show originally aired—where has the time gone? A couple of years had already elapsed when the image accompanying this post was taken. Rory and BFF Lane look closer to graduating than starting high school, as they are in the quote. Unfortunately, this was the only shot I could find of the two of them reasonably close to this timeframe.

You’re unlikely to come away singing “O Holy Night” after watching The Gilmore Girls during the holidays. In its first season, Rory’s rebellious young mom, Lorelai, sasses her stuffy, upper-crust father by intentionally conflating his mother, calling from London, with God, then finishes up by saying: “I still can't get over that I'm related to God. It's gonna make getting Madonna tickets so much easier.” The episode from which the above quote is taken begins with a minor emergency involving the “Before Mary” in the local Christmas pageant, who, inconveniently, ends up in the family way.

No matter. Over the past several years, when I began watching the now sadly departed WB-CW dramedy, I’ve come to think of the setting for the series—the fictional Stars Hollow, Conn.—as a kind of Bedford Falls for the group that New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “the Bobos” (i.e., bourgeois bohemians).

It’s a small town (based on the real-life Washington Depot in the Nutmeg State) containing local merchants, a town square, a gazebo, and quirky characters—not really the simple, struggling blue-collar types sustained by the Bailey Savings & Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life.

But like that classic bit of Capracorn, Stars Hollow has tons of snow—like my 1960s childhood (the decade which, I discovered from a Bergen Record article today, set a record—at least in this particular county--for the most white Christmases in the last century). It’s as if Al Gore and his warnings about global warming never existed.

In case you ever get too cold from all that vicarious snow, you can walk down to Luke’s Diner, where the proprietor dispenses hot coffee, along with an ingeniously concocted—if edibly questionable—“Santaberger” when Lorelai has trouble communicating with her daughter. (Luke’s gruff, laconic exterior conceals a good heart, much like his backwardly worn baseball cap hides a very full head of hair.)

And, even more plentiful than snow, the series had all that clever, whip-smart dialogue. If you exclude the first, best season of Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting, this is probably the closest that a primetime series comedienne has come to the type of lines that came regularly from the mouths of Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, and other leading ladies of 1930s screwball comedies.

In its infinite wisdom, voters for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences never got around to awarding (or even nominating!) Lauren Graham the Emmy she deserved for her sassy portrayal of Lorelai. (In fact, the show was only nominated once—for Outstanding Makeup for a Series.) It makes you wonder whether democracy—at least as it’s practiced by the grand poobahs of American culture—is all that it’s cracked up to be.

But just about every cast member had a chance to shine, as in today’s quote. Each line was creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s gift to her talented actors. Through the magic of DVD and syndication, all this dialogue represents a huge collective gift to an audience yearning for wit and warmth not just during the holidays, but all the year round.

P.S. As for anyone contemplating purchasing Metamorphosis for the CEO of this site (highly unlikely, given that the tale’s target reader is intellectual), my attitude is epitomized by Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, as he reads the first sentence to see how it meets his requirements for his new show: “ ‘Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach.’ Nah, it's too good."